Early on in his career, he took commercial work as a way of funding his solo projects, but that pluralistic approach has led to a career in which he is now as acclaimed for his soundtracks and ballet scores as he is for his own more personal work. This breadth is doubly important given the sheer range of Richter’s work. For a time he earned a living as a pianist, and collaborated with British electronic group The Future Sound of London and the DJ Roni Size. He went on to study piano and composition at the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Academy of Music, completing his studies with the experimental composer and electronic pioneer Luciano Berio in Florence. He has described himself as a “cripplingly shy” child and was obsessive about music and books. Richter was born in Hamelin, north-west Germany, but grew up in Bedford. Currently, he must surely be noted as the favoured composer of those working from home.
But perhaps his most famous composition is Sleep, an “eight-hour lullaby” released in 2015 intended to accompany a full night of restfulness and which, as of July 2020, had amassed close to 500m streams. Fans of Bridgerton will be familiar with one of his best-known works, “Vivaldi Recomposed”, which he described as “throwing molecules of the original Vivaldi into a test tube with a bunch of other things, and waiting for an explosion”. Given that he can lay claim to being the world’s most-streamed “classical” composer, you will almost certainly have heard his work: Richter has written music for more than 50 film and TV projects, including HBO’s My Brilliant Friend, Tom Hardy’s Taboo and Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. Intense, haunting, exhilarating, provocative – it often feels as if he is part-composer, part-inventor. Richter at his and Yulia Mahr’s Oxfordshire studio © Tom Jamieson
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